The encounter in the 1960s and 70s between Marxism and film studies, as an institutionally recognised academic field, was a radically incomplete and perhaps even a rather superficial and unsatisfactory affair. The work of cross-fertilisation between Marxism and film and their critical sifting of concepts and perspectives had hardly begun when for the same reason that the encounter had started—the pressure of wider historical forces for social revolution—it ended. That first encounter risks being institutionalised in histories of the subject as a primitive stage that a linear history of progress has now irrevocably left behind. Yet that history productively ghosts much of the work in this volume, one which seeks to demonstrate that the dialogue between Marxist thought and film studies can only be assumed to have stopped to the detriment of film (and arguably to Marxism itself). That dialogue needs to be taken up again in a deeper and lasting form and in a more committed relationship. That is the purpose of this issue.